(Opinion) “I ain’t gonna take the blame for no bastard child! It would ruin me, man. You can understand that, can’t you? Listen to me, boy. She was … delusional. She was crazy.”

So goes the frantic defense of Rev. Preston Teagardin in Donald Ray Pollock’s masterful novel The Devil All the Time. Confronted with his sexual assault of a vulnerable young woman in his congregation, Teagardin’s first instinct is not repentance, but self-preservation. His reputation, his ministry, his very identity are paramount. The victim, in his distorted reality, is not a person bearing the image of God, but an obstacle — a “crazy” and “delusional” threat to his carefully constructed world.

Teagardin, pastor of the Coal Creek Church of the Holy Ghost Sanctified, is a chilling archetype of the spiritual predator. As the novel’s narrator observes: “Preston loved the way people listened to him and held onto every word. He was grateful his mother decided all those years ago that he was going to be a preacher. He’d never win a fist fight, but he could recite the Book of Revelation in his sleep.”

This giftedness, coupled with a voracious appetite for a platform — the backslaps from simple country folks, the passing “Great sermon, Reverend!” — foments a deadly spiritual narcissism. He comes to believe his own sense of grandeur, his divinely anointed status, somehow exalts him above the very moral commandments he preaches. His charisma becomes a cloak for his corruption.

This disturbing portrait is not confined to the pages of Appalachian Gothic fiction; it echoes in the headlines and court documents of our own world. A recurring theme in the tragic stories of clergy sexual abuse is the perpetrator’s insidious use of theology to groom and manipulate.

Abusers often frame their predatory desires as a divine mandate, telling the victims that God himself desires their sexual union. This tactic is a grotesque form of spiritual coercion, designed to shatter a victim’s ability to resist by pitting their conscience against what is presented as a direct revelation from God.

One recent, egregious example involves the disgraced former Vice President of Truett McConnell University, Bradley Reynolds. According to reporting by The Roys Report, Reynolds manipulated a female student by claiming God had revealed to him in a dream that his wife soon would die and that she, the student, was destined to become his new wife.

This is the predator’s theology in its purest form: a private, unverifiable “revelation” is deployed to bypass biblical ethics, moral reason and basic human decency. The goal is to create a closed spiritual system where the predator’s word is God’s word, and to question him is to question God.

This weaponization of “divine insight” is not limited to sexual predation. It is the same mechanism used by televangelists who claim special words of knowledge that a specific, and often substantial, dollar amount must be given to procure a divine blessing. In both scenarios, the leader claims access to a secret pipeline to God, a pipeline that conveniently delivers instructions benefiting their own lust or greed. They present themselves as indispensable mediators of God’s will, making the flock dependent not on God’s word, but on the leader’s latest vision or prophetic utterance.

The Apostle Paul, writing to the church in Colossae, provides a stunningly prescient diagnosis of this spiritual pathology. He warns against those who would lead the church astray through a fixation on the supernatural that is detached from Christ:

Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you. Such a person also goes into great detail about what they have seen; they are puffed up with idle notions by their unspiritual mind. They have lost connection with the head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow.

Paul’s critique is devastatingly precise. The predator “delights in false humility,” projecting an image of piety while nursing a ravenous ego. They go “into great detail about what they have seen” — their dreams, their visions, their words of knowledge — making these subjective experiences the basis of their authority. Paul’s verdict is that such a person is “puffed up with idle notions by their unspiritual mind.” The source of their “revelations” is not the Holy Spirit, but their own carnal, self-serving imagination.

Most critically, Paul declares such a person has “lost connection with the head,” which is Christ. This is the ultimate theological failure. By supplanting the authority of Scripture and the corporate wisdom of the church with their own private revelations, they sever themselves from the true source of life and growth. Their ministry is no longer about building up the body of Christ but about feeding their own appetites. They are a rogue cell, disconnected from the head, that can only harm the body.

True spiritual growth, as Paul insists, happens when the whole body is connected to the head, growing together “as God causes it to grow” — not as a predator wills it to.

The theology of a predator, in the end, is no theology at all; it is merely the idolatry of self, dressed in holy vestments.

This commentary, which originally appeared at Baptist News Global and has been reprinted with permission, does not necessarily reflect the view of The Roys Report. 

David Bumgardner is a writer, theologian, and educator living in Columbus, Ohio.